Bay sail-maker furls its business / Handiwork earns fans but can't turn profit in current economy

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For 6 1/2 years, Michael Freinberg couldn't wait to get to work. He had a dream job, he thought. He was the owner and CEO of Sutter Sailmakers in Sausalito, which made custom sails for yachts and small boats. It was a small, quality operation.

Now it's all over. Sutter Sailmakers is closing Saturday, one day short of the firm's 50th anniversary.

There are a lot of these sad stories in a recession -- but this one is sadder than most. Peter M. Sutter Sailmakers, to give it its formal name, was a small, traditional company with a lot of history. But the bottom line is that it couldn't compete in a global economy. The world is big, and this company was too small.

The heart of the operation was a sail loft on the third floor of Sausalito's big Industrial Center Building -- a room the size of a basketball court, with high ceilings and a view of Richardson Bay out the windows.

It is all wood and glass, and in a storm, the place creaks like a ship at sea.

It is a light, airy kind of place, and the work they did was special -- here seamstresses sewed and cut sails, laid them out on the floor, and turned sailcloth and Dacron into sails for sloops and yawls and schooners. It was all custom work, done by hand to a high standard.

After the sail was cut, bolt ropes were hand-sewn to the outer edge of the sail. At the corners, a bronze ring called a kringle was pounded into the sail.

It's tricky, Freinberg said, and has to be done just so. The sail has to be both supple and strong, and careful work is the key.

They could restore older sails, take out the stitching, craft the curve of the sail, "the power pocket," Freinberg called it, "the most powerful curve in the sail."

They would sew the seams up again and send the sail back to the boat it had come from, so a good skipper could sail on the

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as if the boat had wings.

"Beautiful work," Freinberg said, "No one does what those sail-makers do any more. It's a dying art."

And now the company has died. The big guys, the global economy, the way the world works, did Freinberg in.

Sutter could make a set of sails for a 38-foot yawl, a big boat, big enough for the annual Master Mariner's Race, for about $9,500 -- a Genoa for $4,000, a mainsail for about $3,800, a smaller sail for the mizzenmast for $1,700. The sails come with bolt ropes, complete, top quality, ready to go.

"My competition would do it for a solid third less," Freinberg said.

The difference is the competition would do it overseas -- take the measurements, and fax the order to sail-makers in South Africa, or Sri Lanka or Hong Kong. Or the competition might have an advantage because of the economics of scale. There are other sail-makers in the Bay Area, but they are big.

There was no room for a custom sail loft with old -- and beautiful -- tools on the top deck of a building full of artists in the funky north end of Sausalito, near houseboats and small boat repair yards.

The business has been sliding off for a long time. Rents went up -- they tripled in six years, Freinberg said -- the global economy boomed and the local economy tanked, and the slow months of winter were coming.

"When I paid all the bills on the first of the month and there was no money left, I decided to close up rather than go in debt," Freinberg said. "What went wrong? The economics of it," he said. "We just couldn't . . ." his voice trailed off.

"Mike did a good job. He did a lot of good work. He tried really hard," said Terry McGuinness, who was one of 14 seamstresses when she started at Sutter Sailmakers 30 years ago.

"I used to crawl on the floor and cut sails, until my knees gave out," she said. "Now everything's mechanized."

McGuinness loved the work, loved sailing -- she had her first boat, a tiny El Toro which she sailed on Lake Merritt in Oakland when she was 8. She wanted to be near the saltwater, and she understood sails and how to sew them. She could get the most out of the sailcloth, do the careful work and do it right. It was a craft, and she was a master.

McGuinness and Bob Eastman were the last employees. He's 62, she's 59. They retired at the end of October; they could see the way the wind was blowing anyway. "I'm kind of tired," she said, "it's time to go. But it's sad."

The end of "a real local sail loft, a throwback to the old days, is a real loss," said Richard Spindler, a loyal customer.

"It's horrible. It's just one more nail in the coffin of the maritime history of Sausalito," said Bill Price, harbor administrator for the Richardson Bay Regional Authority. "No one makes local sails any more. Sutter Sails was the exception to the rule.

"Their sails were really good, really bulletproof," Price said. He has a set of Sutter sails on his 24-foot boat. "It's the end of an era," he said.

The era began Dec. 1, 1952, when Peter Sutter and Bill Larson opened their loft. Larson was a craftsman, who had trained in the best sail lofts on the East Coast. Sutter was a salty legend, and his loft was considered one of the best and most innovative on the West Coast.

"Pete Sutter was here at the right time and the right place," Freinberg said. The business thrived.

Business was not Sutter's first love: It was the sea. He sailed 10 races to Mexico and four across the Pacific and raced on San Francisco Bay for dozens of seasons.

He sold the company and sailed out the Golden Gate to the far Pacific. One voyage took eight years. He died in 1996, two days before Freinberg bought Sutter Sailmakers from Howard Matken, who had the company for a dozen years.

Now it's come full circle. They've had their Going Out of Business Sale, and all that's left are some tools, some odds and ends in boxes, and the past.

"It's been the hardest and the best 6 1/2 years of my life," said Freinberg,

who is 45. "It taught me business, it taught me how to treat people. It was like a Bar Mitzvah. It taught me to be a man.